French Fridays with Dorie: Spicy Vietnamese Chicken Noodle Soup

October 15, 2010

Welcome to week trois of French Fridays with Dorie. This week’s recipe, selected by Dorie herself, is Spicy Vietnamese Chicken Noodle Soup. Why Vietnamese? Vietnam is a former colony of France, so it’s not uncommon to find Vietnamese restaurants in France. So what’s in the soup? Onion garlic, ginger, whole spices (those are removed before serving), fish sauce, coconut milk, lime juice, Chinese egg or rice noodles, and chicken that’s been poached in the broth and then shredded. That’s not the whole ingredient list, but you get the gist.

This soup was awesome! It also wasn’t difficult to make. I’m not a huge fan of shredding chicken, but even that step didn’t take that long. The combination of flavors was delicious; if you like Asian flavors, you’ll probably like this soup. We did!

My Notes

I improvised on some of the spices, according to what I had on hand.

I did not use cilantro, but I did add some chopped flat-leaf parsley at the end of cooking.

I used light coconut milk.

I used rice noodles.

I served this with basil and hoisin sauce. Finally a use for the jar of hoisin sauce that was sitting in my pantry!